Two students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) may have helped WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning spirit classified information out of military databases, according to a CNN report. Read the full article. [Computerworld]
A hardware hacking expert here at Defcon18
successfully faked several attendees’ cell phones into connecting to his
phony GSM base station during a live demonstration that had initially
raised concerns at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Read the full article. [Dark Reading]
A research group led by computer scientists at the UCLA Henry Samueli
School of Engineering and Applied Science has proved that cryptography
— the practice and study of hiding information — that is based solely
on physical location is possible by using quantum mechanics. Such a method, the researchers say, allows one to encrypt and decrypt
data at a secure location without pre-sharing any cryptographic keys
that can be used to lock or unlock sensitive information. Read the full article. [Science Daily]
Two years after a major flaw was exposed in the
Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS), a major upgrade to the
infrastructure protocol that fixes that weakness is now up and running
in all of the Internet root servers. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]
A new change to the much-maligned Digital Millennium Copyright Act free users who jailbreak their iPhones and other mobile handsets from worries about prosecution under the provisions of the DMCA that prevented circumvention of protection technologies. A separate change announced Monday also gives security researchers some new protections.
At the Defcon conference later this week, Chris Paget, a well-known security researcher who focuses on wireless and RFID issues, will give a demonstration of a technique that enables him to intercept calls made on GSM wireless handsets without any interaction with the user’s handset.
A well-known cryptographic attack could be used by hackers to log into
Web applications used by millions of users, according to two security
experts who plan to discuss the issue at Black Hat. Read the full article. [Computerworld]
Instead of indicating password quality via coloured bars, the Windows crypto tool Thor’s Godly Privacy (TGP) informs users about the estimated time required for a successful brute-force attack on the chosen password. Read the full article. [The H Security]
A group of code breakers believe they have
successfully reverse engineered Skype’s implementation of the RC4
cipher, one of several encryption technologies used by the
consumer-oriented VoIP service. Read the full article. [The Register]
Security weaknesses in the hugely popular file-sharing Web site thepiratebay.org have exposed the user names, e-mail and Internet addresses of more than 4 million Pirate Bay users. Read the full article. [KrebsonSecurity]
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